Howland Reed - Tumblr Posts

Chapters: 26/35 Fandom: Game of Thrones (TV), A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death Relationships: Tyrion Lannister/Sansa Stark Characters: Sansa Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Arya Stark, Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Catelyn Tully Stark, Ned Stark, Bran Stark, Original Snow Bastard(s) Additional Tags: BAMF Sansa Stark, Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Game of Thrones Fix-It

  Summary:

Defiant and war-hardened, Sansa is executed for treason. But death is not always the end. She finds herself a young girl again on the eve of Robert Baratheon’s arrival in Winterfell. Has she gone mad? Or have the gods given her an unexpected gift?

LYANNA STARK APPRECIATION WEEK: Day 1 → Book moments

The little crannogman was walking across the field, enjoying the warm spring day and harming none, when he was set upon by three squires. They were none older than fifteen, yet even so they were bigger than him, all three. This was their world, as they saw it, and he had no right to be there. They snatched away his spear and knocked him to the ground, cursing him for a frogeater. None offered a name, but he marked their faces well so he could revenge himself upon them later. They shoved him down every time he tried to rise, and kicked him when he curled up on the ground. But then they heard a roar. ‘That’s my father’s man you’re kicking,’ howled the she-wolf.“

The crannogman was bruised and bloodied, so she took him back to her lair to clean his cuts and bind them up with linen. That evening there was to be a feast in Harrenhal, to mark the opening of the tourney, and the she-wolf insisted that the lad attend. He was of high birth, with as much a right to a place on the bench as any other man. She was not easy to refuse, this wolf maid, so he let the young pup find him garb suitable to a king’s feast, and went up to the great castle..

Jon Snow defending Samwell Tarly // Lyanna Stark defending Howland Reed

Even then, Ser Alliser would not call an end. “On your feet, Ser Piggy,” he called. “Pick up your sword.” When the boy continued to cling to the ground, Thorne gestured to Halder. “Hit him with the flat of your blade until he finds his feet.” Halder delivered a tentative smack to his foe’s upraised cheeks. “You can hit harder than that,” Thorne taunted. Halder took hold of his longsword with both hands and brought it down so hard the blow split leather, even on the flat. The new boy screeched in pain.

Jon Snow took a step forward. Pyp laid a mailed hand on his arm. “Jon, no,” the small boy whispered with an anxious glance at Ser Alliser Thorne.    

***

“None offered a name, but he marked their faces well so he could revenge himself upon them later. They shoved him down every time he tried to rise, and kicked him when he curled up on the ground. But then they heard a roar. ’That’s my father’s man you’re kicking,’ howled the she-wolf.”    

//

“Look at him, Halder,” Jon urged, ignoring Thorne as best he could. “There’s no honor in beating a fallen foe. He yielded.” He knelt beside the fat boy.   

***

When his fallen foes sought to ransom horse and armor, the Knight of the Laughing Tree spoke in a booming voice through his helm, saying, ’Teach your squires honor, that shall be ransom enough.’ Once the defeated knights chastised their squires sharply, their horses and armor were returned. And so the little crannogman’s prayer was answered…

//

Thorne smiled. “The Bastard wishes to defend his lady love, so we shall make an exercise of it. Rat, Pimple, help our Stone Head here.” Rast and Albett moved to join Halder. “Three of you ought to be sufficient to make Lady Piggy squeal. All you need do is get past the Bastard.”

“Stay behind me,” Jon said to the fat boy.

***

Whoever he was, the old gods gave strength to his arm. The porcupine knight fell first, then the pitchfork knight, and lastly the knight of the two towers. None were well loved, so the common folk cheered lustily for the Knight of the Laughing Tree, as the new champion soon was called.

It’s like poetry or whatever but the Knight of the Laughing Tree and the Knight of Tears as fascinating parallels of and inverses to one another.

In both cases, the goal of the mystery knight is to make an objective point, without the details of their respective identities muddling or neutralizing the message. Indeed, one potential advantage of an individual donning the disguise of a mystery knight is the ability to send such a message to the competitors and/or attendees of any particular event, pursuing a goal otherwise unobtainable or complicated by their persons. Yet where other mystery knights may have wished simply to convey their individual worthiness to compete irrespective of their identities (as, perhaps, Baelon Targaryen did when he tilted as the “Silver Fool” to win his spurs at Old Oak, or as Jonquil Darke did when she entered the War for the White Cloaks as the “Serpent in Scarlet”), Prince Aemon and Lyanna Stark were not interested (or, at least, entirely interested) merely in jousting for the sake of jousting; their victories in the tilt mattered less than their motivations for doing so.

Instead, for both Aemon and Lyanna, their points attempted to correct wrongs which inextricably linked the personal and the political. Aemon’s personal love for his sister (complicated as it might have been by his devotion to the vows of the Kingsguard) was clear, and on those grounds alone he might well have resented the preferment of his brother’s mistress over his beloved sister. Yet the insult did not end at mere familial (or even potentially romantic) closeness between Aemon and Naerys. By publicly attempting to snub the present queen for his current mistress, Aegon IV was declaring to the assembled courtiers and aristocrats that his wife - the only woman he could, at least openly and officially, have a publicly approved romantic/sexual relationship with - was not the fairest woman in the land (or at least among the tourney attendees). Beyond being a major breach of courtly etiquette, such a move could suggest greater ambitions on the part of the king to remove Naerys from her place as queen - no empty threat, when Aegon IV had (likely) already used Morghil Hastwyck as a proxy to accuse Naerys of adultery and when the Brackens had schemed to replace Naerys with Barba. Aemon, himself the champion for Naerys against Morghil and one of the voices to call for Barba’s dismissal, would thus again take up the defense of his sister-queen to an insult at once personal and political.

Likewise, Lyanna framed her rescue of Howland from the bullying squires in terms at once familial and feudal. Howland was, so Lyanna declared him, “my father’s man”, the most fundamental expression of the political order which obligated her, as a member of the liege family, to protect the liege’s vassal with her own power. Just as Lyanna cared for Howland herself following the attack (“t[aking] him back to her lair to clean his cuts and bind them up with linen”, in the tale told by Meera Reed) and welcomed Howland into the bosom of the Stark household at Harrenhal - again emphasizing the personal responsibility of her as a Stark to look after a Reed of Greywater Watch - so Lyanna recognized her role as redeeming the honor of young Howland. It was her duty as a resident Stark to personally take up arms against the master of those squires and defeat them (albeit in a play-combat context), much as Lord Rickard would have been expected to do should anyone have made war on any of his vassals. The insult to Howland had triggered Lyanna’s personal obligation to him as a Stark; here was her opportunity to do as her Stark ancestors had done for generations, caring for and defending the people under Winterfell’s protection.

Yet Aemon and Lyanna diverged in the means by which they conveyed their respective messages, placing them on opposite ends of a symbolism spectrum. For Aemon, the proper moniker to demonstrate his point was the Knight of Tears. Even without the specifics on his shield’s device, the designation conveyed Aemon’s sense of grief at the humiliation of his sister. While the disguise may have subtly recalled the history between the siblings - when Aemon had, so the songs relate, wept to see his sister wedded to their brother - its main purpose was, I think, to communicate the objective shame of the king’s proposed action. If the king himself would forget (or actively refuse) his social duty to his lady wife, Aemon would remind him - not as his brother (whom then-Prince Aegon had ignored in their quarrel at Aegon’s wedding to Naerys), nor as his Kingsguard (since Aemon would, at least in his mind, owe the king his unquestioned loyalty), but as the representation of a chivalric ideal. To so great an insult, Aemon’s guise suggested, any true knight must surely weep - and only such a true knight could redeem the honor of a queen so disparaged by her king.

Lyanna, for her part, also sought to shame the men who (indirectly) humiliated the person she sought to defend, but in a way which more directly mocked the knights in question. The Blount, Haigh, and Frey knights she challenged may not have directly or publicly insulted Howland Reed as Aegon IV attempted to do to Naerys, but their squires’ harassment of Howland reflected none too well on the knights themselves as ostensible instructors of honor and chivalry. The laughing weirwood thus mocked the pretensions of both the knights and their squires to the outward appearance of chivalry. Where the squires had failed in honor by attacking a young and much smaller man, their knights would fail in the public demonstration of knighthood, being roundly defeated by the Knight of the Laughing Tree. This mystery knight, and openly bearing the symbol of a non-Andal, non-Seven-worshiping land and people (and thus without inherent ties to the Andal tradition of knighthood), would humble the knights whose squires had acted so unchivalrously. That Lyanna was of course no knight herself only underlined the joke intrinsic to the choice of device: she could not be the chivalric ideal as Prince Aemon (himself one of the most publicly celebrated knights of all time) had been as the Knight of Tears, but she could secretly advertise that these knights would be unhorsed by a teenage girl with no formal knightly training.

In turn, both Aemon and Lyanna found (or likely found, in Aemon’s case) in the outcomes of their tourneys reversals of their chosen disguises. Aemon might have symbolically wept to see Naerys so insulted by their brother, but in emerging victorious in the tilt, Aemon perhaps restored a smile to Naerys’ face. In being presented with the crown of the queen of love and beauty, Naerys had been publicly acknowledged as the fairest woman in the land (at least in the context of the tourney). Too, that it was a mystery knight who presented her this honor (supposing Aemon was still disguised when he did so) may have only underlined the triumph in Naerys’ mind; to all onlookers, this was not a brother playing favorites against their loathed eldest sibling, but a true representation of knighthood defending the position of the queen. Aegon IV would not cease his attempts to humiliate and undermine his wife after this event, but in at least this instance, the queen and not the king’s mistress (or the king himself) would have the last laugh, thanks (with no small sense of irony) to the Knight of Tears.

By contrast, while Lyanna had chosen a laughing device for her tourney stunt, the end of the tourney of Harrenhal was “the moment when all the smiles died”. If Lyanna had succeeding in (literally) beating honor into the knights whose squires had so abused Howland Reed, she then found herself on the opposite side of the knightly dynamic, the unexpected recipient of the crown of the queen of love and beauty at the hands of Rhaegar Targaryen. Where his great-great-great-great-great-granduncle had refuted an attempt to honor the king’s mistress and instead acknowledged the queen as the rightful queen of love and beauty, Rhaegar likely seemed, to the attendees of Harrenhal, to do precisely the opposite - grossly publicly insulting his own present wife (and the future queen) for the sake of a would-be mistress. Not for Lyanna the power or desire of a Prince Aemon, to follow through on crowning a queen of love and beauty, and so not for Lyanna the ultimately happy outcome promised by her weirwood’s laughing face; hers would be that “sadder story” alluded to by Meera Reed, one more full of tears than Aemon’s tourney victory.

Words cannot describe how much I love the Reeds they’re just these jazzy little crocodile dudes who smoke weed, live in a moving castle and go on spontaneous road trips for the Starks

Shut up about Winterfell shut up about Winterfell lets talk about motherfucking Greywater Watch which is literally a MOVING CASTLE

i know you’re not ready to hear this but 

its ok im not ready for this either

im really really curious if we are ever gonna see greywater watch in the books. like on one hand part of what makes it so cool is how little we know and understand about it and all the ambiguous language used around it that makes you build it up in your head, but i am also dyyyyiinnng to know more and have something happen there.

for the fact that so much action taking place in the north+riverlands, there is a noticable (and imo purposeful) lack of info and action taking place on-page in the neck. personally i think it's to have a big lead up to finally meeting howland and getting the big tower of joy/r+l=j reveal, and i really hope that is at the certified coolest thing in asoiaf - howl's moving castle™

Hold on @visenyaism we don't know if they physically won in the book (or do we I am starting to doubt) anyway I think witchcraft won them that battle.

one of the first physical descriptors given of jon snow is in the comparison between him and robb, wherein robb is singled out as being the stronger (and is later called "strong" again when carrying bran up some stairs). so if jon is out here casually pulling giant spears out of the frozen ground which other men struggled to handle in teams…what incredible feats could robb stark have been capable of. why didn't he standing long jump across the hall at the red wedding to beat up walder frey

ned who was raised alongside child robert baratheon watching robb and jon throw theon clear across the yard during a snowball fight: yea thats about how strong a child should be this checks out